The wind was winter’s scarf, a plain knit of wooly ice. To bare boughs, to rooftop slates, to roadways and thoroughfares same: it wrapped itself in cruel delight, not once, not twice, yet thrice. It gusted and hollered. It twisted in warped glee, stealing heat, ignoring light. Yes, the wind that day was an unholy thing, unleashed with neither manner nor wit. Rude. It was rude. And, one doesn’t forget such a happening.
The sparks came as a phoenix-flower in the night. How its petals leapt and died, only to leap again! Perhaps its summer season was only a minute or so, but in our memories it was a sweet eternity. Then, one more it was blackest night, for such things aren’t born to last. Once it was gone I savoured the gunpowder scent and the kiss of coolest November air, until my goosebumps skin let me know it was time to seek the warmth of home.
The pen was the blue of an hour before midnight, the blue right before the constellations sang. It wrote oxygen into her blood. It amplified her heart’s ba-boom. It replaced the colour of her eyes when it ebbed more pale than an almost extinguished ghost. In her hand it was heat. To the page it was life. To nature it was hope. To the untrained eye it was cheap plastic born of crude oil. To appear so ordinary and yet do so much, Ariah couldn’t see it as anything less than magic.
The blue light fell at the end of the day, washing greens to their softest hue and raising purple’s to their most vivid. Even the clouds that had been white an hour before were an enchanting steel blue. With the golds of the dawn and midday banished, all that was left was for the sky to wash black and herald the return of the moon. So we sat there, Earnest and me, feeling the cooling air that ran the valley floor, resting our limbs and feeling our heads prepare for a dream-filled slumber.
The stovetop kettle sagged upon a mass of cold spills. A thousand fingerprints and never a shining cloth, it became duller with each spin of the clock. Were it ever moved, it moan-clanked, only to languish upon different dirt. Its once chrome shine was a sorry smear of grime. Cold it was, cold it stayed. Dust motes plastered it with the hurry of the grave digger. It wasn’t going anywhere. Days, years, eons - what difference did it make?
In the spring air my soul did repose as if butterfly-borne, borne by as many as Brighton beach has stones. The city breeze was a briny-bluster, yet the kind that elevates. The traffic lulled and surged as if caught in gentlest lunar-gravity. Then, as a kindling star, newborn in a nebular, a lyric sparked into life, lighting up my chest, lighting up my heart. My soles pounded the concrete pavement, the streets passed in a blur. To the birds that sung upon my route, the ones I noticed not, apologies! Deep apologies! Yet an idea-galaxy does not wait.